This blog is intended to provide the reader with important world news with an emphasis on Middle East and North Africa. It will publish news, analyses, comments, and opinions concerning those two regions. However, We welcome any comments, news or opinions which are related to their countries. You can visit too www.asswak-alarab.com for more information.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

The End Of The 'Israeli Spring'

By Daniel Bertrand Monk and Daniel Levine

Professionals protest in Tel Aviv

When
young Israeli professionals erected a tent city on Tel Aviv's Rothschild
Boulevard in protest against the Netanyahu government's indifference to an
affordable housing crisis in Israel, they self-consciously modeled their
efforts on the popular revolutions commonly (if not uncontroversially) referred
to as "the Arab Spring." Handmade signs reading "Rothschild,
Corner of Tahrir" invited passersby to compare this "Israeli
Spring" to the events in Cairo. Many have since done so.

Eight
weeks after the tent cities in Israel went up, they are now coming down. Having
organized what was thought to be the largest demonstration in Israeli history
just over a week ago (approximately 400,000 people or 17 percent of the
country's population took to the streets), the protest's leaders declared this
phase of Israel's social protests to be over. This, despite the fact that the
government made no concrete concessions to them. This fact alone should invite
a reconsideration of the Israeli Spring in terms of its differences from the
demonstrations in Cairo rather than its similarities. Central among these is
the interaction between national-security threats and the preservation of unity
within the ranks of the demonstrators. Protesters in the Arab Spring deflected
their regimes' attempts to use the specter of war with Israel or Islamic
radicalism as an excuse for deferring long-deferred democratic and
parliamentary reforms. In an already intensely parliamentary Israel, quite a
different deflection has been at work: the demand for "social
justice" has been put forward in terms that attempt to deny the centrality
of the Israel/Palestine conflict on the conditions the protestors would seek to
change. At "Rothschild, corner of Tahrir," the protestors have posited
social justice as somehow beyond politics as presently understood and practiced
in Israel. Given the tendentiousness of the Palestinian question within Israel,
it is only by virtue of this basic act of denial that the protests at this
scale are at all possible.

To
be sure, the residents of Israel's tent cities were a remarkably diverse lot.
In addition to a core of committed geek-activists and university students,
there were also remnants of Labor Zionism (like the youth group Hashomer
Hatza'ir), advocates of Jewish-Arab cooperation, activists for divorced
fathers' rights, organizations demanding the end of exemptions from military
service for yeshiva students, religious ecstatics ("Na-Nach-Nachma"
offshoots of Breslov Hasidism), and, most incongruously and briefly, a handful
of members of the notorious "Hilltop Youth'': second or third-generation
settler-hippies, the hash-smoking but also highly militant counterculture of
the West Bank settlements (To be sure, they arrived at the protests as a
provocation and were largely ignored, but the response of the organizers was to
invite them to stay).

Israel's
tent city protest, in short, was itself a big tent. In it, consensus across so
wide a community of protesters could only be preserved by tacitly agreeing to
ignore the core questions of Israeli politics. Eretz Nehederet, Israel's
equivalent of The Daily Show, satirized this situation brilliantly. When its
host asked a cast member playing Daphni Leef (the original organizer of the
tent protests on Facebook) to specify the movement's aims, or to take a stand
on precisely how conflicting demands on the state's coffers were to be
reconciled, the actress playing Leef reverts to the same slogans, offered ever
more loudly: Ha'am-Doresh-Tzedek Chevrati ("the People-Demand-Social Justice")!
When pressed, she replies:"Um...the People demand the things everyone agrees
on...about...them").

In
its very construction, the slogan itself -- the People Demand Social Justice!
-- discloses the denial at work here. A reaction to the nation state's
political fragmentation appears as a demonstration against social
stratification. In shouting "The People Demand Social Justice,"
everyone involved in the Rothschild "revolution" agreed to act as if
the social and economic consequences of placating settlers, ultranationalists,
and the ultra-orthodox -- all united by a shared material interest in
perpetuating the occupation -- had nothing to do with the government's
inability to provide for the needs of "the People". To get 400,000
people onto the streets of Israel without causing a similar
counter-demonstration on the following Saturday night, Israelis identifying
with a bazaar of essentially incompatible political positions tacitly agreed to
pretend that Tel Aviv has joined the wave of popular protests in Madrid,
London, and Athens against the structural adjustment programs that western
economies used to impose upon the global south and have now turned against
their own citizens.

But
the numbers belie this. Israel's curious coalition of the disaffected has
emerged in an economy that is enjoying higher growth in real GDP than Bahrain,
Brunei, and Oman. In sharp contrast to Athens or Cairo, Israel has almost
halved its unemployment rate since 2003, and 80 percent of its wage earners are
employed in service industries. Many of the "urban Bedouins" of
Rothschild Boulevard would get up every morning, zip up their tent flaps, and
go to work in the high tech sector. If nearly one quarter of Israel's citizens
are now falling below the poverty line (and if its middle class has
"vanished," as former Israel Manufacturers Board chair, Dov Lautman
claims), it is because the government of Israel is forced to maintain the
costly infrastructure of two para-states -- one for the ultra-orthodox and
another for the settlers -- before it can even begin going about its own
business. A political double standard has long prevailed in Israeli domestic
politics. While political transfer payments to settlers and ultra-orthodox are
accepted as the cost of doing business, for everyone else -- from the education
and health care systems to the fire service, whose collapse due to sustained
budgetary neglect left much of Israel to burn in forest fires last December --
an ideology of austerity prevails. There is no addressing "the people's"
demand for social justice without facing this.

The
Israeli Spring has lapsed directly into autumn because the movement sublimated
the political causes of a contemporary crisis by protesting its social effects.
What the movement teaches us by virtue of its existence rather than by its own
claims is that in Israel today the stalemated politics of the occupation can no
longer be called by name or looked in the eye. Capitulation to the occupation's
advocates and beneficiaries has resulted in an unacknowledged and at times
unconscious resource war between those in Israel who have a stake in the
conflict's perpetuation, and, as various protest posters put it: "everyone
else." Far from pointing to triumph of new forms of social solidarity,
then, this last season of protests actually signals the widening of potentially
violent divisions in Israel that no longer map neatly onto the logics of the
electoral left and right. A protest that called these other, deeper, divisions
by name would differ as markedly from the present one as would a Berkeley
"teach-in" from a general strike. That, we submit, is the true
difference between the protests in Rothschild Boulevard and those in Tahrir
Square.

-This commentary was published in The Foreign Policy on 12/09/2011
-Daniel Bertrand Monk is the George R. and Myra T. Cooley Professor of Peace and
Conflict Studies, and Professor of Geography and Middle East Studies at Colgate
University. Daniel Levine is research associate in Peace and Conflict Studies
at Colgate University, and lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences at the
University of Alabama
-The authors wish to thank Najib Hourani for his insightful comments on the
first drafts of this essay

About Me

I graduated from the French University in Beirut (St Joseph) specialising in Political and Economic Sciences. I started my working life in 1973 as a reporter and journalist for the pan-Arab magazine “Al-Hawadess” in Lebanon later becoming its Washington, D.C. correspondent. I subsequently moved to London in 1979 joining “Al-Majallah” magazine as its Deputy Managing Editor. In 1984 joined “Assayad” magazine in London initially as its Managing Editor and later as Editor-in-Chief. Following this, in 1990 I joined “Al-Wasat” magazine (part of the Dar-Al-Hayat Group) in London as a Managing Editor. In 2011 I became the Editor-In-Chief of Miraat el-Khaleej (Gulf Mirror). In July 2012 I became the Chairman of The Board of Asswak Al-Arab Publishing Ltd in UK and the Editor In Chief of its first Publication "Asswak Al-Arab" Magazine (Arab Markets Magazine) (www.asswak-alarab.com).

I have already authored five books. The first “The Tears of the Horizon” is a love story. The second “The Winter of Discontent in The Gulf” (1991) focuses on the first Gulf war sparked by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. His third book is entitled “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: From Balfour Promise to Bush Declaration: The Complications and the Road to a Lasting Peace” (March 2008). The fourth book is titled “How Iran Plans to Fight America and Dominate the Middle East” (October 2008) And the fifth and the most recent is titled "JIHAD'S NEW HEARTLANDS: Why The West Has Failed To Contain Islamic Fundamentalism" (May 2011).

Furthermore, I wrote the memoirs of national security advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, Mr Robert McFarlane, serializing them in “Al-Wasat” magazine over 14 episodes in 1992.

Over the years, I have interviewed and met several world leaders such as American President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Margaret Thacher, Late King Hassan II of Morocco, Late King Hussein of Jordan,Tunisian President Zein El-Abedine Bin Ali, Lybian Leader Moammar Al-Quadhafi,President Amine Gemayel of Lebanon,late Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, Late Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat, Haitian President Jean Claude Duvalier, Late United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan,Algerian President Shazli Bin Jdid, Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Siyagha and more...